Date of Award

6-2013

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences

First Advisor

Dr. Ann A. Tyler

Second Advisor

Dr. Janice Bedrosian

Third Advisor

Dr. Regena Fails Nelson

Keywords

phonological awakeness, instruction, preschool, whole-classroom, early literacy

Access Setting

Masters Thesis-Open Access

Abstract

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the impact of explicit, concentrated, teacher-implemented phonological awareness instruction for ―at risk‖ 4- year-olds. Early childhood educators were trained to implement a 10-week program delivered for 20-minute sessions, four times a week, in their classrooms. The program focused on phonological awareness beginning at the level of letter-sound knowledge and advancing to blending and segmenting constituent phonemes in words. Pre- to post-treatment comparisons of phonological awareness and letter knowledge skills indicated that children in the experimental group made significant gains in comparison to the control group in phoneme blending and letter knowledge. Children in both groups showed pre- to post-treatment gains on the majority of measures, but these tended to be more marked for the experimental group. Limitations of the study, implications for clinical practice and future research are discussed.

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